- Android may add a new feature that automatically converts light theme apps to dark theme.
- The evidence for this comes from a new “make more apps dark” toggle that I spotted in the first Android 16 beta release.
- Google has been working on this feature since last year, so it’s unclear when it may launch.
Although many of the best Android apps have a built-in dark theme, not all of them do. Fitbit, for example, doesn’t have a dark theme, and neither do many finance and shopping apps like PayPal, Walmart, and Amazon. Many users are unhappy about these apps’ lack of dark theme support, as they feel dark-themed apps are more comfortable to view, especially at night. Fortunately, Google is working on a feature for Android 16 that could force these apps to go dark.
In April of last year, I spotted development of a hidden “make all apps dark” feature that I thought would go live in Android 15. This mode forced every app to go dark, even if they didn’t have their own dark theme. It worked in more apps than the existing “override force-dark” toggle found in the Developer Options of most Android devices, suggesting that the “make all apps dark” feature took priority over apps’ requests to disable forced color inversion. Unlike the “override force-dark” toggle, though, the “make all apps dark” feature seemed to do a better job at making certain apps go dark, leading me to believe it wasn’t just blindly inverting colors but rather using a more intelligent method of choosing which elements to change.